The debate over how much teachers should be held accountable for academic achievement has captured national attention since 26,000 teachers walked off the job in Chicago last week largely to protest an evaluation system that factors in student scores on standardized tests.

Other school districts — including those in Los Angeles, New York City, Houston and New Haven, Conn. — also are moving toward or have implemented evaluation methods that rely, in part, on test-score data to rate teachers.

Districts throughout San Diego County and California are waiting for official direction from the Legislature before making changes to teacher reviews. Until then, the vast majority of schools in the state continue to assess teachers the same way they have for the past four decades: Their system gives the highest ratings to nearly all teachers — regardless of student achievement.

Factoring in test-score data

• School districts across the country have revamped teacher-evaluation systems, or are considering such changes, as a result of research showing that ineffective teachers can stunt a student’s academic growth and to qualify for grants from the federal Race to the Top Fund.

• At least 30 states call for teacher evaluations to factor in student achievement through test scores. Of those, 13 states and the District of Columbia count test-score data for a minimum 50 percent of a teacher’s appraisal, according to the Education Commission of the States.

Chicago: About 26,000 teachers have been on strike since Sept. 10 to protest a new evaluation system that would count student achievement, as measured through standardized test scores, for up to 40 percent of a teacher’s appraisal.

Los Angeles: Teachers are in talks with administrators over how to comply with a court order to incorporate test scores into job reviews. They’re negotiating how to use the data and how much weight it should be given.

California: Legislation that would have created a statewide teacher evaluation system with a test-scores component was dropped in August.

Here’s how it typically works: Teachers are evaluated based on goals they set with their principals. To determine whether teachers are meeting those objectives, principals usually observe them in a series (or as few as one) of mostly scheduled classroom visits.

That kind of performance review occurs annually through a teacher’s third year. After that, job appraisals are typically administered every other year. The most veteran teachers can go up to five years without a formal evaluation in San Diego and elsewhere.

Lamont Jackson, human resources director for the San Diego Unified School District, said principals are often so busy trying to run schools on shrinking budgets and dwindling staffs that many barely have time to perform meaningful evaluations. He said new or tougher assessment methods should come with resources and interventions that offer help to underperforming teachers.

“Do I think we are holding people accountable to the highest levels? No. Do I think we are capable of that? Yes,” Jackson said. “But I’m not sold on, ‘Here are your test scores, they’re down. You’re not doing a good job.’”

‘Value-added’ assessment

The “value-added” model allows educators to track academic achievement for individual students and set goals for improvement based on their history of learning. The system aims to identify which teachers generate the most progress from students, as well as those who fail to drive up test scores.

Advocates said the value-added approach is helpful in identifying effective versus incompetent teachers, making a clearer case for dismissing instructors who are not getting the job done.

Critics said the value-added paradigm could pressure teachers to “teach to the test” — limiting their instruction to exactly what is on state exams, which in elementary school is largely English and math.

Value-added rankings also can produce data that is skewed because it does not factor in poverty, language barriers, family stability and other obstacles to education, said Linda Darling-Hammond, an education professor at Stanford University and former education adviser to President Barack Obama.

“I have become skeptical and concerned because of what we have learned about how unreliable and distorted the value-added metrics could be,” she said.

For example, studies have shown that teachers with high-performing students often earn low value-added ratings because it’s harder to make significant test-score gains at the top.

Turmoil in Chicago

The debate over how much instructors should be held accountable for students’ academic accomplishments may not get as contentious in California as it has in Chicago, where teachers have entered the second week of their strike.

In Los Angeles, teachers are negotiating with their district about appraisals that a judge said must rely in part on test scores to comply with state law. Legislation to establish a uniform evaluation system in California that includes test scores was scrapped last month. For now, it’s up to the Los Angeles Unified School District’s administrators and teachers to decide how much test scores should count.

Even as educators and lawmakers agree that changes to teacher reviews are needed, many are prepared to battle over the issue.

State schools chief Tom Torlakson called California’s existing evaluation methods “haphazard and inconsistent” last week with the release of a report by a new task force charged with elevating the teaching profession. That study includes heavy criticism of value-added strategies.

Torlakson has called for teacher evaluations that use multiple measures of student progress, such as testing students before and after a specific course of study to track how much they learned. He also said weak teachers should be identified early on and given specialized support.

The San Diego Unified School District is pushing teacher collaboration in an initiative aimed at encouraging schools to set their own models of change.

Some of the district’s most effective principals already use test-score data to assess teachers, although they may not call it value-added.

At Central Elementary School in City Heights, Principal Cindy Marten tracks student records — including state test scores, classroom assessments and other measures — to determine where to focus her efforts on the inner-city campus. Monthly reviews of student progress are a better indicator of teacher quality than annual test scores, which Marten calls “the autopsy” because they come out at the end of the school year.

“We use our data as a tool, not a weapon,” she said.

The expectations for teachers are so high at Central Elementary, Marten said, that a handful of teachers have left the profession in her decade there. They were “counseled out of the profession,” she added.

Poway alternative

The state report from the new task force praised the Poway Unified School District for its teacher evaluation system, which is run by instructors and administrators.

Since 1986 in this academic powerhouse of a district, teachers have been evaluated by colleagues who also coach them on ways to improve.

Veteran teachers are given time outside of the classroom to work as consultants, full-time teacher evaluators and coaches.

Consultants train principals on how to conduct evaluations.

They also meet weekly with first-year teachers to evaluate their progress and help them with everything from curriculum to student supervision. By year two, the consultants work with those teachers on professional development.

And consultants assist seasoned teachers who have received unsatisfactory ratings. After a stretch of professional coaching, those instructors undergo another review by their principal and the consultants.

“Everything we do is focused on, ‘What do we need to do to help the teacher?’” said Candy Smiley, president of the Poway teachers union. “Our hope is that our teachers will either improve and move out of the program or see that this is not the profession for them.”